France's Minitel service in 1983: online banking, eshopping, and B2B
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* No need to register anywhere to use it (your identity was connected to your landline)
* No maintenance or security issues
* No compatibility issues (everything was pretty low-tech, but following strict standards)
On the other hand, it had online payments, payments to sites (the national access provider charged based on access time depending on the service you connected to, and part of the money was funnelled to the service provider) and social media-based civil resistance (french university students coordinated strikes using Minitel as early as 1986). As a result the french population was not really taken aback by those capabilities in the interwebs, they were kinda used to them.
http://www.tetalab.org/images/tetalab/MSM.jpg
It's a neat interface, everybody here in France remember it from the 80's, and it quite easy to hack it.
We should soon release an arduino lib for eveybody to hack it, but it'll be quite hard to find a minitel if you're not in France (nobody use it anymore, it's quite easy to find second-hand, but surely heavy to ship...)
downvote.
The fun part being that there was e-mail and www services accessible from the Minitel.
France Telecom internet provider, Wanadoo (now Orange) used to provide an ActiveX application to access the Minitel over IP; with the per minute usage being billed on the Internet account owner tab.
A few companies still make significant profit from this platform in 2011. And it's still profitable for France Telecom as well.
Low tech works :)
I frequently used BTX to make payments for things I ordered and I seem to remember having a list of one-time use numbers to enter as a security measure. Must have been some kind of electronic signature.
Germany was pretty anti-technology in those days. Instead of hailing early adopters we were frequently criticized as harbingers of a cold and inhumane new world order.
30 years later and ISPs are trying to do this again.
Central planning never works.
I can't tell if the "central planning" you refer to with respect to consciousness is supposed to be a homunculus or an intelligent designer, but either way I disagree.
Brains are pretty well distributed, and various degrees and kinds of brain damage have shown that no specific location is an inherently privileged "command center" of the brain; [different] people have continued to be thinking people without each part of it.
Of course, it can be argued that governments don't just do investments, that they can provide services that may be impossible to obtain otherwise. But when we wonder into real investment territory (like a particular bridge), we have to be able to produce a R.O.I.
What we have to consider is that the alternative uses of the capital will contribute to economic growth and in a longer timeframe, the glamorous visible things like a space program may actually pay for themselves. Not only that, these expenditures will be self-sustaining and long lasting. Or otherwise said, money spent on space (and other visible things) without a R.O.I. is actually detracting from future growth and delaying actual practical space exploration.
In central planning, the dynamics are different. Whomever influences the planners ultimately makes the decisions. The quality of those decisions depends on your perspective and the motivation of the influencers.
In a pure capitalist model, you follow the money. Whomever has money influences the decisions.
There's no right or wrong answer. Oftentimes valuable things appear as unintended consequences of government or commercial projects.
It's hard to declare the internet to not be an example of central planning -- it was built to connect Federally funded labs at universities with Federal dollars. The labs existed to provide (indirectly or directly) research to serve defense and space (which i consider to be a subset of defense) interests.
The difference between the French thing and the Internet is that key stakeholders in the government and academia saw the potential of computer networks as a driver of commerce at an opportune time. If that conclusion was made in 1978, we'd have the French thing on a terminal leased from AT&T or a baby bell.
Equating a telecom system to a railroad, bridge, road, etc from a government POV was a big leap -- but the timing was probably more important and less obvious.
Also "central planning" is too broad a stroke. Are we talking about national central planning, i.e. government programs or are we also going to include central planning in corporate hierarchies, household hierarchies, software design or even things like activities directors in retirement facilities. All valid ways of describing centralized planning. Centralized planning is neither big nor small, you can have it at almost any level & it's success depends on the people involved. Which is why the vague statement made by the OP is somewhat confusing.
But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.
Concepts like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server... Yes all very decentralized concepts..mmm hmmm.
Just because the government didn't initially plan for the Internet to envelop our lives 30 years later, doesn't mean that it wasn't a successful centrally planned project that benefited society. Most things are centrally planned. Much of private industry relies on centralized chains of command. I am not sure what the OPs point was, but seemed more like a veiled jab that suggested centralized government programs are always failures. When the facts are that Minitel shouldn't be classified as a failure & the Internet shouldn't be classified as a poster child for decentralized initiatives.
Which all tend to eventually fail. The Source, CompuServe, Delphi, AOL, all failed.
Second, I was speaking about things like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server architecture as being non-decentralized. Additionally some of the biggest services on the Internet are indeed centralized. Google, Facebook, iTunes. ISP options have also been drastically reduced over the last two decades.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet being centrally planned or not. It was just planned to be more open than those other services.
Central planning probably gets harder the more humans want to cooperate and market mechanisms are very likely superior in those situations but that doesn’t mean that central planning doesn’t work.
But if you ignore the arguments about who funded what there are lots of aspects of Minitel that are interesting because it helped to kick off the wide use of smart cards, the underlying network was packet switched (X.25) and the servers handling Minitel were distributed through the network (so service providers ran their own services).
It wouldn't view Minitel as a failure, however, just because it was replaced by the web. The French were years (probably 10) ahead of the rest of the world in terms of electronic communication and commerce. They had a large internal market online in the 1980s handling a huge amount of commerce.
I would consider the Minitel as a success of central planning. 20 years of e-economy and quite a lot of money moving from French citizen to French corporations or smaller businesses.
I know the US also had some trials of teletext (text pages over broadcast TV) too, but I think that was even less successful than videotel.
Prestel in UK died and BTX in Germany/Austria was but a novelty AFAIR. I have never seen BTX being widely used here but when I was on vacation in France, sure enough even the rest stops on the highway had a few minitel terminals you could pay for. And that was around 94 or 95 when the internet has already been heard of around here in Europe and the first ISPs started popping up.